Major news from the largest NFT marketplace in Web3 as OpenSea announces it is migrating to the Seaport protocol. OpenSea first introduced its marketplace protocol to the world a few weeks ago. Well, it looks like we’re bringing Seaport into action starting today! But what is the Seaport Protocol and what impact does it have on OpenSea users? Let’s take a look.
What is OpenSea’s new seaport protocol?
OpenSea first announced Seaport to the world in May. In summary, Seaport is OpenSea’s new web3 marketplace protocol. Aside from that, Seaport is open source, which means other marketplaces can use the protocol if they wish.
Seaport’s goal is to make buying and selling NFTs cheaper and easier. Aside from being open source, OpenSea says Seaport is “inherently decentralized.” This makes it more attractive to builders and individuals in the Web3 space.
Why is OpenSea switching to Seaport?
Significantly, this move will result in OpenSea surpassing the Wyvern protocol. To clarify, this is the marketplace protocol that OpenSea has been using up to this point. Basically, the biggest improvement over the Seaport switch is in the user cost department.
OpenSea predicts users will save about 35% on gas fees when transacting with the Seaport protocol. For illustration, based on 2021 data, that would have amounted to a total savings of $460 million (138,000 ETH).
The gas savings come as the developers of the Seaport protocol designed it to be more gas efficient than other Web3 marketplaces. In fact, data from OpenSea shows just how significant these gas tariff reductions could be. Not only for buying NFTs in ETH, but also for accepting offers for NFTs in wETH.
It is important to note that users must approve collections in order to access lower gas rates when selling or transferring NFTs. However, these are one-off costs per pickup. In addition, this does not affect existing entries.
Additionally, new users no longer need to pay a setup fee to use OpenSea. In fact, by eliminating the setup fee, OpenSea users could save around $120 million/35,000 ETH per year.
Collection offers, bulk listings, and real-time creator fees are on the way
Fuel fee savings aren’t the only improvement OpenSea brings after its move to Seaport.
On the one hand, users can now offer entire collections on OpenSea. In other words, starting today, you can bid on all NFTs in a collection. Users can also bid on NFTs in a collection with specific characteristics for the same reason. Initially, however, property offerings will only be available for the top 100 NFT collections by 30-day volume on OpenSea.
In addition, OpenSea now displays the rarity percentage, reserve price and top bid for NFTs. These stats are filtered by attribute and give potential buyers more information to make their offers. Finally, OpenSea adds that it is developing a way for developers to opt into feature collection offerings.
This is certainly an exciting development from the leading NFT marketplace. If the Seaport protocol really allows all these features to work on OpenSea, it will be a great win for the platform and its users. Not to mention, OpenSea says Seaport will allow new features to roll out faster. These include the ability to buy multiple NFTs in one transaction, real-time creator fees, and more.
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